From Ben Zimmer comes news of a neat offshoot of his Visual Thesaurus:
When we launched the Visual Thesaurus Spelling Bee this past summer, we knew there was a built-in interest, but the response was still surprising. So far there have been 15,000 players who have tried their hand at spelling a grand total of 500,000 words. It’s clearly habit-forming, with many repeat visitors. The reason why it’s so addictive is that it’s been designed to be adaptive, so the more words that are spelled correctly, the more difficult the words become. And conversely, if you’re not a great speller, the words will get easier and easier. That way a player will always be quizzed at the appropriate skill level — from the orthographically challenged to the most expert spellers.I'll give you a word of warning so you don't stumble the way I did: be sure to read the definition on the lower right before trying to spell it.As more and more players try the Bee, the game has steadily improved based on data collected on how words are spelled. Words are being continuously reanalyzed for difficulty based on how spellers fare. Every five minutes, words are rescored for difficulty taking into account the latest data from the Bee spellers. That means there’s an increasingly better fit to different skill levels. ...
For each word, a graph is generated to plot the distribution of right and wrong answers across different skill levels. Then a curve is drawn to fit the data. If that curve rises very steeply, then the word is a good “discriminator”: it’s an accurate way to separate the good spellers from the bad spellers.
"The Reanimation Library is a small, independent library based in Brooklyn. It is a collection of books that have fallen out of mainstream circulation. Outdated and discarded, they have been culled from thrift stores, stoop sales, and throw-away piles across the country and given new life as resource material for artists, writers, and other cultural archeologists." Their mission, their FAQ, and a personal history of the library. I'm sure there are "books are your friends" fundamentalists who find the reuse of books for unintended purposes distasteful, but as long as they aren't rarities, I don't have a problem with it. (Of course, I'm a proud owner of one of the editions of Tom Phillips's A Humument, I would say that, wouldn't I?)
I wrote about the online journal Linguistic Discovery, "dedicated to the description and analysis of primary linguistic data," a few years ago; as Claire, from whom I picked this up, said, it seemed to be "dormant for a while," but it's still chugging along at the rate of an issue a year, and the latest (2007) issue has articles by James N. Stanford on adjective intensifiers in Sui ("an indigenous minority language of southwest China") and by Gary F. Simons, Kenneth S. Olson and Paul S. Frank about the digital archiving of a 204-item wordlist in Ngbugu ("an Ubangian language spoken in Central African Republic"). Check out the archive; articles are available in both pdf and HTML formats.
I'm cautiously optimistic about this:
Google will pay $125 million to resolve claims by authors and publishers and to pay legal fees, as well as create a Book Rights Registry where copyright holders can register works to get a cut of Internet ad revenue and online book sales.I'm perfectly prepared for it to make no difference in practice, but if it does—if I notice a substantial decrease in the number of times I hit the thrice-damned "snippet search" or, even worse, "No preview available"—it will be very good news indeed. (Via MetaFilter.)The agreement will also make many in-copyright, out-of-print books available for readers in the U.S. to search, preview and buy online. And instead of small snippets, copyright protected books will now have 20 percent of the content available for preview.
“What makes this settlement so powerful is that in addition to being able to find and preview books more easily, users will also be able to read them,” writes David Drummond, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development, and Chief Legal Officer of Google. “If a reader in the U.S. finds an in-copyright book through Google Book Search, he or she will be able to pay to see the entire book online.”
Some years ago I posted about Ian Frazier's Atlantic piece on Martin Tytell, king of the typewriter repairmen; now I regretfully report that he has passed on, via The Economist's lyrical obituary ("Martin Tytell, a man who loved typewriters, died on September 11th, aged 94"):
Everything about a manual was sensual and tactile, from the careful placing of paper round the platen (which might be plump and soft or hard and dry, and was, Mr Tytell said, a typewriter’s heart) to the clicking whirr of the winding knob, the slight high conferred by a new, wet, Mylar ribbon and the feeding of it, with inkier and inkier fingers, through the twin black guides by the spool. Typewriters asked for effort and energy. They repaid it, on a good day, with the triumphant repeated ping! of the carriage return and the blithe sweep of the lever that inched the paper upwards.Thanks for the link, Paul!Typewriters knew things. Long before the word-processor actually stored information, many writers felt that their Remingtons, or Smith-Coronas, or Adlers contained the sum of their knowledge of eastern Europe, or the plot of their novel. A typewriter was a friend and collaborator whose sickness was catastrophe. To Mr Tytell, their last and most famous doctor and psychiatrist, typewriters also confessed their own histories. A notice on his door offered “Psychoanalysis for your typewriter, whether it’s frustrated, inhibited, schizoid, or what have you,” and he was as good as his word. He could draw from them, after a brief while of blue-eyed peering with screwdriver in hand, when they had left the factory, how they had been treated and with exactly what pressure their owner had hit the keys. He talked to them; and as, in his white coat, he visited the patients that lay in various states of dismemberment on the benches of his chock-full upstairs shop on Fulton Street, in Lower Manhattan, he was sure they chattered back...
A couple of years ago I wrote about the fact that the American moose is the same as the European elk (the American "elk" being an entirely different creature), citing Mallory and Adams' The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World
English and French have less elaborate terminology for moose [than does Carrier], but interestingly, in both languages, the term used in North America is different from the term used in Europe. The term moose used in North American English is a loan from Eastern Abenaki moz, cognate to the Plains Cree word more familiar here in Western Canada, mōswa. In British English, moose are called elk, a word that goes back to Proto-Indo-European. The animal called elk in North American English is a different species, Cervus canadensis....There is considerably more information about moose (as well as a dig at the "The Canadian French term for moose is orignal, which comes from Basque oreina "deer" via orignac, the form that the Basque word took on in the Basque-Micmac pidgin used by the Micmac and visiting Basque fishermen and whalers. The European French term, élan,is a loan from Middle High German elend, which is ultimately related to the English word elk.
The scientific name for moose, Alces alces, contains the Latin term for moose, which is a loan from some Western Germanic language. Moose are not found in Italy, so the Romans only encountered them when their conquests led them well to the North.
By the way, a U.K. commenter, "Puzzled," writes:
"In British English, moose are called elk." Huh? I'm hoping that this is just a joke that I fail to get, rather than an assertion (about my native language) for which I cannot think of any evidence. Plenty of British people may not know for sure what an elk looks like, but I've never come across one who couldn't recognise, and name, a moose, if only on the basis of dimly remembered school lessons about Canada.Bill responds, "I guess this shows the Americanization of British English." To which Puzzled returns: "Not Americanization so much as Canadianisation, I guess (or suppose)," only to be corrected by Skullturf Q. Beavispants:
That would be "Canadianization". :)(I wrote about Canadian spelling here.)
(We write "colour" and "flavour" but "analyze" and "generalize".)
MMcM's Polyglot Vegetarian, which is consistently both nutritious and delicious, has a post presenting all the epigraphs to Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's The Gilded Age, of which the authors wrote: "Our quotations are set in a vast number of tongues; this is done for the reason that very few foreign nations among whom the book will circulate can read in any language but their own; whereas we do not write for a particular class or sect or nation, but to take in the whole world." MMcM says, "I thought it would be fun to actually transcribe these mottoes, which appear at the head of each chapter, into LT. And, since so many 19th century books have been digitized, it is easy to find many of the sources and check them." Now, that's my kind of fun! This is the kind of thing that might have occurred to me to do if I were reading the novel (which I now, of course, want to do), but I would probably not have had the patience to actually follow through—there are a lot of chapters, and many have more than one epigraph. (I add, with awe and reverence, that when MMcM couldn't find a quoted text online, if at all possible he got the source from the library and scanned the relevant page.) Just about every obvious language is represented, plus all sorts of unexpected ones (Quiché, Syriac, Cantonese, Cornish...); I warn you that if you have any leaning towards this sort of thing, just reading the post (and clicking on all those links, which must have taken an unimaginable amount of time to assemble) will eat up much of your day, but you won't regret it.
Incidentally, something leaped out at me when I read the Russian epigraph to Chapter XLIX: Солнце заблистало, но не надолго: блеснуло и скрылось ("The sun began to shine, but not for a long time; it shone for a moment and disappeared"). A tip of the hat to the first reader who reproduces my trivial insight (which, I might add, has nothing to do with the grammar or meaning of the sentence).
A couple of typos MMcM might want to correct (I would have left a comment on the post, but couldn't manage to sign in correctly): "Erewon" should be Erewhon, and "le al de l'action" should be "le mal de l'action."
And those of you familiar with 19th-century Japanese can help him out with this one:
XI. (p. 108 / 104, 317):くらへどわあじしらず
Japan: Though he eats, he knows not the taste of what he eats.
I have not been able to locate the source of this saying, or to find its equivalent online. The handwritten text uses a hentaigana form of し shi, based on 志; fortunately, it's one of the common ones and even included in the Wikipedia's short sample. It took me a bit to realize that it is written right-to-left — after remembering that 'taste' is aji (あじ = 味) from reading an interesting article on the history of MSG and the Ajinomoto Company in Gastronomica. So it reads, kura hedo wa aji shirazu. The end must be 味知らず and the beginning 食ら. I don't think the へど is 反吐, so that it might mean 'eat until you get sick', though that's the only thing in the dictionary. I'd welcome comments straightening me out from anyone whose 19th century Japanese is better than my poor attempt.
Arnold Zwicky at the Log posts an amusing Doug Savage cartoon that I should try to get the publisher to incorporate into the U.S. edition of my book (which should be out in not much over a year, or so they tell me).
Totally unrelated, but not worth a post of its own: I was mildly annoyed today when in one of the "dictionary game" segments of the radio show "Says You" the word whose definition was to be guessed was kis. The OED says:
Obs. rare—1.
[a. Gr. κίς.]
A weevil.
1658 ROWLAND Moufet's Theat. Ins. 1086 The English call the Wheat-worm Kis, Pope, Bowde, Weevil, and Wibil.
I'm sorry, but a borrowing from Greek that some guy in the seventeenth century claimed was used by "the English" (a couple of Oxford dons, perhaps?) and that occurs nowhere else is not a suitable candidate for the game, if you ask me. There should be at least a sporting chance that someone might know the word.
There's a post at Néojaponisme about "outlander Japanese": the ways in which non-native speakers try to fit into a Japanese-speaking environment. Do you consciously strive to speak "just like a Japanese," or do you preserve some foreignisms to show you're aware you'll never actually be Japanese or (if you're female, as some commenters point out) to give yourself more room for maneuver and be taken more seriously? Do you pronounce borrowed words as the Japanese do? (Universal answer: yes!) What first-person pronoun do you use? The post consists of an exchange between David, who thinks foreigners should aim for bog-standard Japanese and not try to "show off," and Matt (of No-sword), who talks about "fitting in as opposed to blending in" and doesn't want "to play the role of an interchangeable, personality-free cog." He emphasizes the need for "performance and display": "If you were always perfectly clear and unambiguous, you would by definition be incapable of telling a joke. You would also probably find it hard to get much of an emotional reaction from people in general." I'm on Matt's side here, but it's an important subject that doesn't get talked about enough, and the many comments on the thread are almost uniformly thoughtful and interesting, with a minimum of one-upmanship (something that is all too common among foreigners discussing the language they've all learned, as I know from my time in Taiwan). I urge anyone interested in the topic to pop over there and (if they're so inclined) join the discussion. (I might add, with gratitude, that almost all the Japanese is transliterated, so the rest of us can follow along.)
A recent New York Times Magazine focused on food, and one of the stories is "Kosher Wars," by Samantha M. Shapiro. It starts out talking about Andy Kastner, a rabbinical student who has been "studying how to slaughter animals according to Jewish law." Shapiro explains the words shechita, 'ritual slaughter,' and shochtim, 'ritual slaughterers' (the singular, which she uses later without italics or explanation, is shochet). A couple of paragraphs later, she writes: "He has been trying to set up a grass-fed-kosher-meat co-op in his neighborhood; he says he hopes to travel to a local farm and shecht the animals himself."
I was quite startled by this, since shecht is not an English verb except in the variant of the language used by Orthodox Jews familiar with Yiddish, in which 'to slaughter' is shekhtn. (A Google search on "to shecht" will illustrate the point; the first hit is "If Nick wanted to shecht a creature having all the proper simanim, what should his chalaf not have?") What startled me more, when I looked the words up in my trusty Weinreich
In this story from yesterday's NY Times on Obama's upcoming trip to Hawaii to visit his sick grandmother, Liz Robbins writes: "Mr. Obama calls Ms. Dunham 'Tutu,' a local term for grandparent that he sometimes shortens to 'Toot.'" Naturally, I turned to my Pocket Hawaiian Dictionary, but under T it simply said "All loan words from English sometimes spelled with initial t- are entered under k-." Well, this didn't seem to be an English loan, but I tried the K section anyway and there it was:
kūkū. 1. (Usually pronounced tūtū.) Granny, grandma, grandpa; any relative of grandparent's generation.
Now, for one thing, I don't understand how the same term can be used for 'grandpa' and 'grandma' in a kinship system that distinguishes by gender; more relevant for LH, though, is this business of the consonants. Can any reader more familiar with Malayo-Polynesian than I explain why this word is "Usually pronounced tūtū" when Hawaiian does not have /t/?
A typically thoughtful essay by Orhan Pamuk on his relation to Turkish literature and to books:
I regret that I have not been able to shake off the enlightenment idea that books exist to prepare us for life. Perhaps this is because a writer's life in Turkey is proof that they are. But it also has something to do with the fact that in those days Turkey lacked the sort of large library where you could easily locate any book you wanted. As for books in foreign languages, not a single library had them. If I wanted to learn everything that there was to be learned, and become a wise person and so escape the constraints of the national literature - imposed by the literary cliques and literary diplomacy, and enforced by stifling prohibitions - I was going to have to build my own great library.Thanks, Jeremy!Between 1970 and 1990, my main preoccupation after writing was buying books; I wanted my library to include all the books that I viewed as important or useful. My father gave me a substantial allowance and from the age of 18 I was in the habit of going once a week to Sahaflar, the old booksellers' market in Beyazit. I spent many days in its little shops, which were heated by ineffective electric heaters and crowded with towers of unclassified books; everyone from the shop assistant to the owner, the casual visitor to the bona fide customer, looked poor. I would go into a shop that sold second-hand books, comb all the shelves, leafing through the books, and I would pick up a history of the relations between Sweden and the Ottoman empire in the 18th century, or the memoir of the head physician of the Bakirköy Hospital for the Insane, or a journalist's eyewitness account of a failed coup, or a monograph on the Ottoman monuments of Macedonia, or a Turkish précis of the writings of a German traveller who came to Istanbul in the 17th century, or the reflections of a professor from the Çapa Medical Faculty on manic depressive disorder; and, after bargaining with the shop assistant, I would cart them all away.
(Anyone interested in modern Turkey should read the long, informative, and in places incendiary article by Perry Anderson in a recent LRB.)
I've barely started reading Entertaining Tsarist Russia: Tales, Songs, Plays, Movies, Jokes, Ads, and Images from Russian Urban Life 1779-1917
Gualikh goes on to marry an African princess named Refuda and have a son named Guak, who needless to say becomes a hero in his own right and has many adventures, including winning the heart of an Amazonian princess named Veleuma, but I'm not going to tell you about all that. Instead I'm going to mention the cognitive dissonance induced by seeing exotic names like Zilagon, Gualikh, and Guak associated with the homely (to me) place name Florida (and if anyone has any suggestion about where those names might have come from, by all means share it), and point out that the whole thing is manifestly a prediction of the victory of the Tampa Bay Rays in the playoffs. Of course, it would have been clearer if rather than Canada the Princedom of Florida had conquered the Duchy of Massachusetts (home of the Red Sox), but I submit that the 50,000-seat amphitheater with its "places for visiting magnates" is obviously Tropicana Field with its luxury suites.
Incidentally, the Guak story seems to have been utterly forgotten; in English Google finds only the book I'm quoting from, and in Russian, aside from references to the title, it seems to exist online only in a comedy "Говорят, будет воля!" ['They say there will be freedom!'] by some guy named "N. Zinoviev" in an 1864 issue of the literary-political journal Sovremennik. A bunch of yokels think a book contains the freedom they've been promised, and they insist a literate deacon read it to them; on page 57 he starts reading it to them, and it turns out to be this very story: "Зилагон, владетельный князь американской Флориды, был тот великий и славный муж..." Unfortunately, he doesn't get very far into it before the yokels grow impatient with the lack of freedom and move on to another plot element.
There's an interesting post at the Log today in which Geoff Pullum surprised me by writing:
At some time in the middle 1970s, Deirdre Wilson and I noticed that we had never seen the past participle of the verb stride anywhere. In fact we didn't even know what it was. When you stride off, what is it that you've done? How would it be described? Have you strided? Have you strode? Have you stroded? Have you stridden? Have you strodden? We realized that we hadn't a clue. None of them sounded familiar or even mildly acceptable to us as native speakers.As I said in the thread:
I am American and spontaneously produced stridden (which I'm pretty sure I've actually used in speech); so did my wife, though since she had a British-born father her testimony may be tainted. At any rate, it is clearly a ridiculous overstatement to say it does not exist or is never used. The OED says, quite properly, "The pa. pple. rarely occurs."A number of other people also said stridden seemed natural to them. One commenter said "This reminds me of the fact that in Russian, there are a couple of nouns which lack a genitive plural form (but have all the usual forms, including a genitive singular). The word for 'poker' (the thing you find by a fireplace) is one of them." To this I responded:
You're thinking of кочерга [kochergá] 'poker,' which has a perfectly good genitive plural, кочерёг [kocheryóg]. But it's not often used and isn't intuitively obvious, so Russians can have a hard time coming up with it, as in a famous Zoshchenko story from 1939, "The Poker," in which a factory director is trying to order five pokers (the numbers five and above requiring the genitive plural for the following noun) and in dictating his letter says "I urgently request the shipping of five… What the hell? I don't remember how to write it: five koche… Three kochergi is clear. Four kochergi, no problem. But five.. what? Five…" The secretary tries to help by running through the declension: "Who, what? kocherga. Of whom, of what? kochergi. To whom, to what? kocherge…" But when he gets to the plural, the secretary says it's swirling around in his head and he can't remember it. Finally a clever member of the staff rewords it so it reads "We have six stoves and need a separate poker for each of them rather than the one we have now, so we need an additional five." A very funny story.Another commenter really riled me by writing "One time I heard someone say, 'I used to could do that.' It's wrong in at least two different ways when you analyze it, but she did manage to get a 'plain' form out of 'can'. Despite it's incorrectness..." I tried to remain civil:
No, no, no, no. It is not "incorrect" or "wrong" just because it's not part of your dialect. It is a perfectly good construction common in southern dialects; since I have Ozark forebears I am familiar with it and sometimes use it myself. English is a house of many mansions; let's try not to pare it down to a puny one-room hut, eh?
I recently ran across a Russian word unknown to me, мухояр [mukhoyár], an obsolete term for a kind of cotton fabric mixed with silk or wool. It looks like a purely Slavic word, perhaps having something to do with муха [mukha] 'fly'—imagine my surprise when I looked up the etymology and discovered it's from Arabic! Vasmer (in my Russian edition) says "Из тур.-араб. muḫajjar 'ткань из козьей шерсти', откуда нем. Масhеiеr, польск. muchair, франц. moire"; in other words, it's from Arabic mukhayyar 'preferred, chosen' (referring to the material, presumably), a form of the verb khayyara 'prefer' (from which comes also the common adjective khair 'good'). French moire does not come directly from the Arabic but from English mohair, which the OED says is ultimately from the Arabic but "probably partly via Italian mocaiaro" (itself, of course, from Arabic); the earliest citations have -c-, e.g. 1570 J. CAMPION in R. Hakluyt Princ. Navigations (1599) II. I. 115 "There is also cotten wooll,.. chamlets, mocayares." We later borrowed moire back from the French. What a tangled multinational web!
The other Russian word whose etymology recently surprised me is a very common one, внезапно [vnezapno] 'suddenly.' I've known the word for forty years, but for some reason I looked at it and thought "I have no idea where that comes from," so off I went to Vasmer, where I learned that it's from Old Russian запа, заапа [za(a)pa] 'hope, expectation' and its derivative вънезапу [v"nezapu] 'suddenly, unexpectedly' (literally 'in-not-expectation'); Church Slavic has невъзаапъ [nev"zaap"] (literally 'not-in-expectation') in the same sense. But the base word за(а)па is itself a compound, consisting of the prefix за- and a verb that occurs in Old Czech as japati or jápati 'observe,' which has a derivative nedojiepie 'unexpectedly'—comparable to внезапно (or more closely to the obsolete form незапно) but with -do- instead of -za-. But wait, there's more! The Slavic root *ар- is probably related to Latin op-, found in opīnor 'think, suppose, hold as an opinion,' opīnio 'opinion,' and inopīnus 'unexpected' (a nice parallel). Who would have thought that the root of внезапно was ап?
For many years, I had wanted to read C.L.R. James's famous Beyond a Boundary
I should preface my remarks, which are not in line with the quoted blurbs, by saying that I came to the book (like your average Yank) knowing nothing about cricket other than its fabled exemplification of British upper-class ideals. I had thought this might not be a great obstacle—I had, after all, read a number of books about soccer with enjoyment despite my lack of expertise—but it turns out that an intimate acquaintance with the history, terminology, and experience of the game is a prerequisite to the enjoyment of large chunks of the book. I skimmed pages and pages full of stuff like this: "I was an off-side batsman, drive, cut and back-stroke through the covers. Of course, I could also hook." "This is what happened to George in Australia: 23, 82, 131, 34. Then he failed steadily: 27 run out and 16; 0 and 11 (Test, to Grimmett both times); 3; 14 and 2 (Test); 19 and 17." "Constantine in the first innings went in at No. 8 and made 24 not out. The score was 132 for eight in the second innings when Burton joined him." I perused Wikipedia's excellent entry on the game, with its very useful illustration of the fielding positions (cover, point, gully, and so on) and related terms (deep, fine, forward, backward), but it didn't really help. You have to know what all of it means, in the way I know what is meant by "a hard bouncer to third" or "an easy double play." Don't get me wrong: I have no desire to make fun of what I don't understand (I got over the apparent silliness of terms like, well, "silly mid-off" a long time ago), and my respect for the game was if anything increased by realizing how much there was to understand. But there was no help for it: understanding it would take far more effort than I was willing to put into it, so a great deal of the book was lost on me.
Furthermore, it is not a book of the sort I expected: a carefully designed fabric in which the strands of sport, autobiography, and politics were woven together to create a brilliant pattern. It's more like a collection of essays loosely united by those themes. It starts with pure autobiography (focused, to be sure, on the cricket games played just outside the window of the house in which he grew up), moves to his attempts to establish himself in England, passes on to the history of cricket as a game, and winds up with an impassioned brief for West Indian cricket and the nationalism of which it is an inextricable part; some of the chapters could be excised without the book as a whole suffering in the least. This meant that I could skim long sections with an easy conscience, since I knew it would not much affect my appreciation of the whole, but it made me wonder why the book is so revered... except that, of course, I know that someone who knew nothing of baseball would think the same of Roger Angell's The Summer Game or John Thorn's Armchair Book of Baseball or Arnold Hano's A Day in the Bleachers.
My advice to someone who shares my ignorance of cricket but wants to get the best out of the book would be to read the first chapter, "The Window," James's evocation of his childhood; Chapter 18, "The Proof of the Pudding," an exciting account of the scandalous behavior of the West Indian cricket crowd in 1960 and its consequences; and in between, Chapter 8, "Prince and Pauper," which focuses on the West Indian cricket hero Learie Constantine and James's relations with him following his journey to England in 1932. Here is the crucial paragraph that sums up the book in its last sentence:
I accepted [Constantine's] offer, and we agreed to meet in England the following spring. The plans were as rapid in the making as in the telling. At the time he had, I think, dined in my house once. I doubt if his wife and mine had yet met. We didn't know it but we were making history. This transcendence of our relations as cricketers was to initiate the West Indian renaissance not only in cricket, but in politics, in history and in writing.The story he tells about the West Indian renaissance is a good one; you just have to extract it from the sticky wicket on which it resides.
A couple of items of linguistic interest: the etymology of the word cricket is, in the OED's word, uncertain; and James repeatedly uses a phrase between wind and water in a way I am unclear about, e.g. "That particular [Victorian] age he [W.G. Grace, the Babe Ruth of cricket] hit between wind and water." The OED says "along the line where anything is submerged in water or in damp soil, esp. on the load-line of a ship, which, as the vessel tosses, is alternately above and below the water's surface," but that doesn't help much.
I'm still not ready to go back to Tolstoy, but that's OK—my wonderful sister-in-law just gave me a copy of a book I've long wanted, Entertaining Tsarist Russia: Tales, Songs, Plays, Movies, Jokes, Ads, and Images from Russian Urban Life 1779-1917
Patricia Yollin of the San Francisco Chronicle has a great story, "UC linguistics students get lesson of lifetime," describing an unusual Field Methods class. A similar class was one of the highlights of my own linguistics education: we met every week to elicit forms from a speaker of Toba Batak (a language of Sumatra), and each had to produce a grammar by the end of the semester; we were not supposed to use English with our informant, although sometimes we slipped up. The difference here is that the language has never been described by linguists (except for a word list):
Nzadi is one of the most obscure tongues in the world. That's exactly why a UC Berkeley class has embraced it.You can watch a minute-long YouTube clip with snippets of the class and talks with the professor and the informant; read the story for more (the informant, Simon Nsielanga Tukumu, "grew up in the Congolese village of Bundu in a family of fishermen," has been ordained as a Jesuit priest, and "is now working toward a master's degree in ethics at the Graduate Theological Union"). I will seize this opportunity to once more propagandize for the old-fashioned kind of linguistic training that emphasized intensive study of non-Indo-European languages as a necessary part of a linguist's background. Thanks for the link, Eve! (Incidentally, Prof. Hyman founded the Comparative Bantu On-Line Dictionary (CBOLD), a very useful project.)"There's nothing like the joy of discovering a language from scratch," said Cal linguistics Professor Larry Hyman.
The 10 students in his course, Introduction to Field Methods, are focusing on Nzadi this semester - the first such effort in any college or university to examine this remote member of the Bantu linguistic family.
"It's a chance to study a language that nobody has studied before," said graduate student researcher Thera Crane. "That opportunity does not come around very often."
Nzadi is spoken by thousands of people in fishing villages along the Kasai River in Congo, a country with about 220 languages.
The students in Hyman's class have two goals. They want to figure out how to analyze an unfamiliar language and they plan to document Nzadi - a tongue so unknown that it cannot be found in the Ethnologue, a compendium of almost 7,000 languages across the globe....
Hyman also would like to produce a grammar by the end of the semester that could be published. Each student would be responsible for a chapter.
Translator Daniel Hahn has started a very interesting blog:
Translation – like most kinds of writing, like most kinds of artistic creation – tends not to expose itself to an audience till it has reached its finished form. A reader is encouraged to read a finished book – which may be a third, fifth, or fiftieth draft, which has been worked and re-worked, corrected, questioned, edited, polished and proofed – and to disregard the imperfect stages that have preceded this final one. You are requested kindly to keep well away from the rehearsal room until the performers and production team have their show ready for public viewing, if you please.He's translating Estação das Chuvas by José Eduardo Agualusa, "a wonderful Angolan novelist I’ve been privileged to work with a few times before." There are three posts up so far, with lots of thought-provoking stuff, like this from the latest:In this blog I hope to examine the translation process, working through a novel from my own first launching into a first draft, right up to publication. It’s not a blog about the life of a translator – musings about translation generally, reports of events I’ve attended or readings I’ve given, people I’ve met at launch parties, books I’ve read – but intimately about a single piece of translation work, which I hope will bring you closer to the experience, to the pleasures it brings and the questions it raises.
I mentioned in my last post too the issue of local specific words/things that my readers won’t know, and I gave the example of quicombo – this exotic something that in that first extract was perfuming the air in Lídia’s room as the novel opens.I, of course, like footnotes, but I'm hardly the average reader.The alternatives would be to find a closeish translation (it’s a kind of wood, so a reasonable alternative – a scented wood – sandalwood? rosewood? It’s neither of these, quite…); to retain quicombo in the Portuguese and maybe italicise it so it’s obviously foreign and assume it doesn’t much matter if no one knows (my usual inclination); or to footnote it – “A wood with which beds used to be made because it was believed that its intense scent repelled insects.”
That last solution seems the least appealing – a very distracting thing to a reader. But… rather curiously, there’s a footnote, with just that text, in the original edition too. This makes things more complicated...
Geoff Pullum presents an interesting conundrum at the Log:
In 1934, the philologist A. S. C. Ross wrote a review of the 1933 Oxford English Dictionary Supplement (Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 35: 128-132) in which he referred to taboo words as "mumfordish" vocabulary. He used the same word again in the same year in a short note in Transactions of the Philological Society (volume 33, issue 1, page 99), and again made it clear that for him it was a synonym for "taboo" or "obscene" as applied to lexical items. Charlotte Brewer of Oxford University, an expert on the history of the OED (author of Treasure-house of the Language: The Living OED and creator of the marvellous Examining the OED website), mentioned in a paper presented at the ISLE-1 conference in Freiburg last week that she was baffled by the word mumfordish. So am I. Can any Language Log reader shed serious (rather than speculative) light on its etymology?I join him in the quest, except that I welcome speculation as well as solemn scholarship. My guess is that the reference is to Lewis Mumford, who was already well known as a literary critic and authority on architecture and urban life by 1934, but of course it could be to some now-forgotten person or literary character of that name, perhaps even a personal acquaintance of Ross's (although it seems unlikely that in those buttoned-down days a scholar would make a puckish personal reference that his readers had no hope of deciphering). I was briefly encouraged when I discovered that Lewis Mumford had a book called Sticks and Stones (1924), but it turns out to be about American architecture. Any suggestions?
The Onion takes us back:
In late 1783, change was sweeping the Western world. The Revolutionary War had drawn to a close, the Treaty of Paris had been signed, Mozart's Great Mass was performed for the first time, and, with the Montgolfier brothers' balloon, mankind was poised on the threshold of flight. And only one newspaper, H. Ulysses Zweibel's The Onion, had the courage to stand against it all. Here, for the first time ever, is a reprint edition of The Onion's October 6, 1783 issue.I would like to draw your attention in particular to their attack on that Rogue Noah Webster: "Have we, in this Newe Wourld, cast off one Tyrant, who would taxx our Tea and Gov'rn us from A Far, only to adopt an Other who would shew us How to Speak, and Standerdise our Speling with a Rod of Iyrn, and Up Braid our ev'ry Pronouncement, as does a Dictinrie?" (Thanks, Kári!)
In yesterday's post I mentioned reading a story by Oleg Zaionchkovsky (whose name, incidentally, is the Polish equivalent of Russian Zaitsev, both based on cognates meaning 'hare'); I had no problem with most of the vocabulary, but I stumbled when I got to this sentence: "В дом из них вела дверь, толсто обитая какой-то кирзой" ('From [the entrance hall] into the house led a door thickly covered with some sort of kirza'). When I got home, I consulted my dictionaries and discovered that кирза was "kersey." Ah, to be sure! (thought I)—now what the hell is "kersey"? Well, according to Merriam-Webster, it's "a: a coarse ribbed woolen cloth for hose and work clothes b: a heavy wool or wool and cotton fabric used especially for uniforms and coats." OK, that makes sense.
But I couldn't let it rest there; no, I had to look up кирза in Russian, and it turns out that's not what it means. Russian Wikipedia says it's "material made from a multilayer cloth base saturated with special substances. A kind of oilcloth. The surface of kirza is stamped to make it resemble pigskin. Among the people it has received the name 'the devil's hide.' ... It goes mainly toward the manufacture of army boots. It is also used to make rubberized drive belts." The association with army boots is strong, as you can see from the Google image search; there is also Vadim Chekunov's "Kirza: A story of army life as it is." This is clearly not a kind of cloth, and the translation as "kersey" is a classic example of lazy lexicography: find an English word in the same semantic field that sounds similar enough to be convincing and stick it in; never mind that not many people know the English word and its meaning is completely different.
The question arises: how should кирза be translated? In this passage, where its exact nature is not especially important, I suppose you could say the door was padded with imitation leather, but if anybody has a suggestion that could replace "kersey" in a bilingual dictionary, please share it. Also, if you're familiar with the word "kersey," in what context do you use it?
Since we moved from Peekskill to Massachusetts almost four years ago, I haven't managed to get back to New York—too long and expensive a journey. But I discovered that a local college to which I am tenuously connected has occasional bus trips leaving at 6:30 AM and getting back around 10:30 at night (almost eight hours on the bus and a little over eight hours in the city) at a very reasonable price, and I grabbed the chance. The bus let us off at Broadway and 53rd, having passed through Columbus Circle, which is completely different than it was when I last saw it. I walked over to MOMA, also completely different, and then to the Donnell Library; having forgotten my December post about its imminent demise, I was shocked to see it empty and abandoned. I walked down Fifth Avenue enjoying the splendid fall sunshine, detoured through Rockefeller Center (where I used to work) and Bryant Park, and had a lively lunch with my old friend the Growling Wolf (during which I don't think we said a word about baseball, although that is usually one of our main topics; I'm not sure which crash-and-burn was more responsible, the economy's or our teams'—he's a Yankees fan, I a Mets fan).
Then I took the Q train to Brighton Beach (being very pleased to hear two women speaking Georgian across the car from me) and walked to my usual Russian bookstore, Санкт-Петербург (Sankt-Peterburg). I had a general goal and a specific goal. The general goal was to look through the literature shelves and grab anything I'd been wanting; the specific goal was to find a copy of Oleg Zaionchkovsky's Петрович [Petrovich], the one novel Anatoly recommended when I asked him what recent Russian works were worth reading. They didn't have any Zaionchkovsky, which disappointed me, but I found a cheap edition of Turgenev's Записки охотника [A Sportsman's Sketches], which Nabokov thought his best work, and—this really thrilled me—a beautiful new edition of Ivan Shmelyov's Солнце мертвых ['Sun of the dead,' his scarifying novel of the vicious Civil War in Crimea] that includes his autobiographical novel Лето Господне ['Summer of the Lord'] and three stories. I'd been wanting to read Shmelev in full ever since I discovered him via some excerpts in an anthology. So even though I regretted not finding Zaionchkovsky, I walked back down Brighton Beach Avenue reasonably content.
When I walked the block to the beach itself and called my wife (who loves beaches), I saw from the cell phone that I had more time left than I thought and didn't need to dash back to Manhattan, so I figured I'd walk down to Coney Island Ave. and visit the older, smaller, and shabbier Black Sea Book Store, where I had found some good things in the past. I patiently pored over the shelves and was about to give up when down at the bottom I caught the name Олег Зайончковский (Oleg Zaionchkovsky). It was a 2007 Собрание сочинений [Collected works], and when I opened it I found it had not only Petrovich but his earlier collection Sergeev i gorodok ['Sergeev and the town'], as well as some more recent stories. This made me very happy indeed; I went back to Manhattan, had a terrible gyro from a street vendor, and on the long ride home read stories by Zaionchkovsky and Turgenev, both involving izbas and both excellent reads.
Mara Goldwyn sent me a link to the new Babbel Blog, of which she's co-editor. She says, "We focus on issues of language, education and technology," and there's some interesting stuff up; I was particularly taken with “Trying to get them to use modal verbs while they’re being chased by a bear”, an interview with Todd Bryant, who teaches German using the online game World of Warcraft:
I don’t think you can teach German entirely within World of Warcraft. But as an additional hour in the evening, whenever they would otherwise be watching a film or TV in German, I think it’s certainly better than those kinds of activities, because they have to produce language as well as just receive it; they need to speak and they need to write and if they don’t understand something, that affects their gameplay. So they really need to concentrate on the language they are exposed to.Incidentally, to whoever sent me the copy of Danske stednavne med udtaleangivelse [Danish place names with pronunciations], by Kristian Hald: thank you very much! Danish pronunciation is very hard to figure out from the spelling; I'm not surprised, for example, that Vrads Sande is /vras sanǝ/, but I wouldn't have been able to guess it.I thought it was really good for them. They were exhausted at the end of an hour - concentrating that long in German after only six weeks of German! And they were really, really, tired, but also very motivated.
Victor Mair at Language Log has posted about a new dictionary that ups the ante in the East Asian contest "to see who can produce a dictionary with the most entries":
The Koreans at Dankook University have just pulled off the amazing feat of compiling a dictionary that has outstripped anything yet generated by the Japanese or the Chinese themselves. After 30 years of labor and investing more than 31,000,000,000 KRW (equal to more than 25 million USD), the South Koreans have just published the Chinese-Korean Unabridged Dictionary in 16 volumes. This humongous lexicon contains nearly half a million entries composed of 55,000 different characters.Which is interesting in itself, but I'm linking to the entry for Victor's discussion of why "there will never be an end to the compilation of ever larger single character dictionaries, since the Chinese writing system is essentially open-ended" and why it's pointless to try to accumulate as many characters as possible: "most of the characters in these mega-dictionaries can only be attested as having occurred once in history, and that often in lexicons of obscure characters!" There's a very interesting graph of "number of characters" versus "rate of coverage" that shows that 6,600 characters cover 99.999% of what's found in actual text, which means a massive compilation like the Zhonghua zihai 中華字海, with over 85,500 different characters, is an exercise in overkill.
We all know about "the three R's": readin', 'ritin', and 'rithmetic. I always assumed it was an old wheeze making fun of people who couldn't spell, but it seems it was started by an English politician who actually couldn't spell, or at least wasn't thinking about spelling when he said it; in this Wordorigins.org thread about the expression, Dr. Techie quoted the OED as saying "The phrase is said to have originated in a toast proposed c1807 by the English banker and politician Sir William Curtis (1752-1829)" and gave this citation as evidence:
1825 Mirror of Lit. 29 Jan. 75/1 It has been very much the fashion amongst a class of persons to attribute to Sir W. C. certain bulls… He is charged with having given, at public dinners, the following toasts:—‘The British tars of Old England’. ‘A speedy peace, and soon.’.. ‘The three R’s—Reading, Writing, and Rithmetic’.As I said in response:
Interesting: if that’s true, it didn’t originate as a conscious joke but as a “bull” (i.e., “an expression containing a manifest contradiction in terms or involving a ludicrous inconsistency unperceived by the speaker”). Just as Sir William didn’t notice that “soon” didn’t add anything to “speedy,” he didn’t notice that two of the three “Rs” didn’t actually start with the letter r.
I just discovered a very interesting etymology that has apparently been developed only recently. The OED says the origin of calypso (the name of an Afro-Caribbean style of satirical song) is unknown; Webster's Third New International (1961) says "probably after Calypso, island nymph." But Richard Allsopp's superb Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage
[ < Efik ka isu 'go on!', also KID Ibibio kaa iso 'continue, go on', a common phrase used in urging sb on or in backing a contestant. The Efik-Ibibio being the established middlemen in the slave trade (ex at Calabar) the slaves of other ethnic groups would have brought this item (as they did BAKRA) to the CarA as part of the private vocabulary of slave life. In the context of CarA plantation-life, crowds backed creole teasing-songs against MASSA shouting 'Ka iso!' wh gradually lost its original meaning. Kaiso is still the regular ECar folk name, not calypso. The phonological development /ka-iso > kariso > kaliso/ is attested by KARISO (Dmca, etc), KARUSO (USVI), and KALISO (StLu) this last recognized as 'another form 'Calisseaux' ... in use at the same time as 'Carisseaux' ' —(Espinet & Pitts, Land of the Calypso, 1944, p. 47). The development > calypso is through corruption (through folk etym) by English writers in the 1930s, influenced by the name (Calypso) of the amorous island nymph of Greek mythology, plus an anglicized shift in pitch pattern /1'12/ > /1'21/]Most of the abbreviations should be self-explanatory, but CarA is "Caribbean area" and KID in the first line is Elaine Kaufman's Ibibio Dictionary (Leiden, 1985). The key to the etymology is the recognition that the original form is kaiso; I love the fact that the transmogrification to the highfalutin "calypso" is called, quite properly, folk etymology—the ignorant "folk" aren't always poor and unlettered! And the careful discussion of how the African form would have reached the Caribbean and been preserved should be a model for such things (there are far too many silly African pseudo-etymologies floating around out there).
The entry in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate says "Trinidad English, alteration of kaiso, perhaps ultimately of Afr origin"; the caution is probably appropriate for a general-usage dictionary, but personally, I'm provisionally convinced by the Efik-Ibibio etymology.
Francis Deblauwe of Word Face-Off ("Comparing the evolution in internet-popularity of words and phrases") has had the excellent idea of comparing the popularity of multilingual synonyms in multilingual countries in this post, "Library vs. Bibliothèque vs. Bibliotheek vs. Bibliothek in Canada, Belgium and Switzerland." A sample finding:
In Canada, approximately 75% of the population speaks English and 25% French. When doing a Google Insights for Search test for the same word in both languages, limited geographically to internet users from Canada, one would expect to see proportional Google-popularity. For instance, we would expect to find library and bibliothèque in a 75%/25% proportion. Instead, the actual overall proportion (2004-present) was 94%/6%. Odd! However, the second test with bookstore/bookshop and librairie came out with a perfect 75%/25% split. I would guess that this inconsistency might have something to do with a too limited data set for Google searches in Canada, rather than a cultural distinction...The graphs for Belgium and Switzerland are also interesting.
Unbelievably, wood s lot is eight years old and still going as strong as ever. Back in October 2000, Mark Woods was linking a Ted Honderich article ("This new piece begins with a defence of determinism against those hopeful persons who think it has been refuted by Quantum Theory"), "A touching story from Lingua Franca's archives: Death Of An Altruist Was The Man Who Found The Selfless Gene Too Good For This World? by James Schwartz," "Virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier says computers are too dumb to take over the world, by Damien Cave," TheWatcher Website ("Millennium Apocalypse Updates Conspiracy & End Time Prophecy: bringing you all you could ever need to know about The New World Order, The One World Religion, Masons, British Israelites, Rosicrucians, Pokemon Mind Control, The Southern Baptist Convention and other dire portents"), stuff on Owen Barfield, Pierre Trudeau, Derrida, Haruki Murikami, internet radio, love and the brain, Orwell, and much more. Today he's celebrating Elizabeth Bishop, linking to Greenscapes, further memorializing Hayden Carruth, focusing on the "train wreck of investment vehicles" and related politico-economic phenomenal, and much more, including the usual gorgeous selection of photographs (lately often including his own, which are excellent). I know of no one on the internet with a wider range of interests or better taste, and I with my measly one post a day stand in awe of his unceasing flow of links, quotes, and images. All I can say is: keep it up!
Anatoly, in this post, mentions facts about the history of French and Russian pronunciation I didn't know; I'll translate:
Ricard in "History of the French Language" [I don't know what author or book is referred to here —LH] mentions that in the 17th century words like table, coffre were usually pronounced without the final [l] and [r], but in the 18th century, under the influence of the orthography, these sounds returned.He finishes by wondering if similar developments could be found in English; it seems to me I should be able to come up with some, but I'm feeling woolly-brained, so I'll just toss the question into the waiting crowd.It's curious that this recalls a situation in the Russian language, where in the first half of the 19th century корабль, рубль [korabl', rubl'] still had the standard pronunciation /korap'/, /rup'/, but then under the influence of orthography (and also of declined forms, I think) soft l returned, and the old standard forms were kept only in popular speech and dialects.
Having returned to my reading of War and Peace in Russian, I was looking up a dance teacher mentioned in the text named Petr Iogel (for some reason called "Vogel" in my Dunnigan translation, and I wish I knew what kind of name Iogel was) when I stumbled upon a fascinating essay by historian E. Tsimbaeva called Historical Context in a Literary Work: (Gentry Society in War and Peace) (from that link you can get to a pdf and an html file; it's a translation of Исторический контекст в художественном образе, from Voprosy literatury, 2004). Tsimbaeva focuses on aspects of Tolstoy's novel that contradict what she as a historian knows of early nineteenth-century Russian life. She presumes that Tolstoy was aware of his distortions, and occasionally speculates about why he made the changes, but the mere contrast between fact and fiction is sufficient to hold my attention. [Note: Anatoly in the comments links to a thread (in Russian) with fairly devastating rebuttals by therese_phil and taki_net; I had been assuming the airily sweeping tone of Tsimbaeva's article reflected a confident command of the facts, but apparently it's more a matter of superficiality. I'll add corrections in brackets as needed.]
She starts with a description of the various ways in which the opening scene, at the salon of Anna Pavlovna Scherer, a maid of honor to the Dowager Empress, is impossible: maids of honor did not hold salons [not true: see taki_net's comment, citing Shepelev's Титулы, мундиры, ордена в Российской империи (Наука, 1991) to the effect that many maids of honor left the court for long periods, got married, and had normal social lives]; they were never married [not true: see above], and "single men and women could not meet informally in a masterless house"; and "no high-society event such as the one that Scherer's guests take their leave to attend could have been held in the July of any year during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The St. Petersburg season ended in June, when the court transferred to Tsarskoe Selo." But what I want to highlight here is a section focusing on the presence of French in the novel (a phenomenon I discussed in this post). This comes up in her discussion of the various improbabilities in the Kuragin family, including their very odd names; Ippolit, or Hippolyte, "was Polish, Little Russian, or associated with the social miscellany that constituted the raznochintsy. It could be attached to a minor bureaucrat who never rose above the tenth rank due to his non-noble birth and poor education" but was impossible for a princely family. [Not true; therese_phil points out that it was unusual and had a foreign ring but was not at all unknown in noble families, citing many examples.] She continues:
A third method of disparaging Hippolyte is the description of his lisp-
ing, broken Russian when he, for reasons unknown to the guests and not
explained by the author, tells a story in Russian "imitating the kind of
speech that Frenchmen achieve after a year or so in Russia." The issue
of the use of French in a Russian novel perturbed both Tolstoy and his
earliest readers and publishers. The author himself explained the abun-
dance of French phrases by the fact that during the age in question this
was "a form that expressed a French cast of mind," that people in early
nineteenth-century Russia used French "for thought as well as speech."
It is difficult to judge whether the author himself had been genuinely
misled or was deliberately intending to mislead his readers.
Russian nobles were not born knowing French; they had to learn it. And
how did they do that? First in the domestic setting, from a French tutor
or even without one, if French was spoken at home; then at a first-class
school; and finally, abroad. Russian children living in Russia interacted
constantly with Russian tutors, nurses, nannies, coachmen, and so forth:
so, while they spoke perfect French, they also had a command of Russian,
although what they said was sometimes incorrect or overly colloquial.
Russian children who were educated abroad really did not know their
native language and for the rest of their lives spoke it with an accent.
Though Hippolyte and Anatole were educated abroad, that was a
concept with extremely limited application during the age in question.
Hippolyte, for one, could not have been educated in France. [But they could, for example, have gotten a fine French education in Switzerland, as therese_phil points out; this entire discussion is wrongheaded, including the supposed examples of Russians who did not know French well: "Dmitriev, who 'did not speak French,' translated French prose by the kilometer and wrote letters in that language (and his contemporary Karamzin, who according to Ts. did not have the chance to learn French well, was perfectly at home in it)."]
... The French language was, to be sure, not at all out
of place in Scherer's salon, inasmuch as the hostess herself and half of
her guests were of foreign extraction. But their "foreign cast of mind"
must not be straightforwardly extrapolated to the mindset of Russia's
"important people."
I don't know about you, but I can't get enough of that stuff, and there's plenty more. (To give another tidbit, in a discussion of Pierre, who in the novel inherits the Bezukhov title, she says "There are no instances in Russian history of a title being passed to an illegitimate offspring, so here too, Tolstoy was not allowing himself to be ruled by reality.) Good for Russian Studies in Literature for publishing the translation. [But it would be nice if they had a follow-up with corrections!]
Craig Brown in the Telegraph has a very funny reductio ad ab-sir-dum of the Disgusted in Tunbridge Wells genre of letters to the editor, linguistic subsection: The collapse of the English language. It starts thus:
SIR - The word I have just written is surely the most commonly mispronounced. In these sloppy times, why do so many people insist on saying "sur"?...and descends into a maelstrom of increasingly crazed prescriptivism. (Thanks, Paul!)R. Birtwhistle, Bicester
I discovered via jessamyn's fine obituary MetaFilter post that Hayden Carruth died last night at his home. (I urge you to visit the post for the links, for the poems people quote in the thread, and for the Carruth quote jessamyn cites that ends "His sympathies extend even to despised creatures like rats and car salesmen. 'I’ve always felt sorry for the rats,' he says." [And of course there are more good links and poems at wood s lot.]) As I wrote there:
I can't say this is unexpected news, but that doesn't make it any easier to take. For many years I've been saying Carruth was one of my favorite living poets, and now I have to remove one of those qualifiers. I became acquainted with him through The Voice That Is Great Within Us and didn't discover his own poetry for years afterwards, but I made up for lost time. His Collected Shorter Poems and Collected Longer Poems are essential for any poetry collection, and if you can find a CD of him reading his poetry, he's one of those rare modern poets who can really do justice to his own poetry.The Voice That Is Great Within Us
is still my favorite poetry anthology, three decades after I bought it, and the reason it took me so long to discover the editor's own great poetry is that, being self-effacing to a fault, he included only a few haiku of his own in this tremendously influential anthology. But his poems tend to be long enough that they're hard to anthologize anyway. Here's the one I quoted at MetaFilter:
Not Transhistorical Death, or at Least Not Quite
Jim Wright, who was a good poet and my friend, died two or three years ago.
I was told at the time that we did not lose him.
I was told that memories of him would keep him in this world.
I don't remember who told me this, just that it was in the air, like the usual fall-out from funerals.
I knew it was wrong.
Now I have begun to think how it was wrong.
I have begun to see that it was not only sentimental but simplistic.
I have examined Jim in my mind.
I remember him, but the memories are as dead as he is.
What is more important is how I see him now.
There, there in that extreme wide place, that emptiness.
He is near enough to be recognizable, but too far away to be reached by a cry or a gesture.
He is wearing a light-weight, brightly colored shirt.
His trousers belong to a suit, but the coat has been discarded.
His belt is narrow and somehow stays straightly on his pot belly.
His shoes are thin and shiny.
I think he bought those shoes on his last journey to Europe.
He is walking away, slowly.
He is wandering, meandering.
Sometimes he makes a little circle.
Sometimes he pauses and looks to one side or the other.
Sometimes he looks down.
Occasionally he looks up.
He never looks back, at least not directly.
Although he recedes very gradually, and becomes very gradually smaller, I continue to see all the aspects of his face and figure clearly.
He is thinking about something and I know what.
It is not the place he now occupies in my life.
He cannot imagine that, only I can.
He is neither what he was (obviously), nor what he is (for I am quite sure I am inventing that).
Is he Jim Wright? Is he not someone else?
Yes, he is Jim Wright. No, he is not someone else. (Who else could he possibly be?)
When I die, he will arrive at where he is going. And I will set off after him.
My wife just mentioned to our year-old grandson (who took the news with equanimity) that a coaster had fallen off the table. It suddenly occurred to me to wonder why a small object placed under a glass is called a "coaster," so I turned to the OED, where I found: "So called from ‘coasting’ or making the circuit of the table after dinner." This makes sense because it used to mean "a low round tray or stand for a decanter," so when you passed the port you were actually passing the tray it stood on. I love it when there are good answers to interesting questions.
